(Approx. 903 words)

Circuit Writer Version 6.4
by Jim Scheef, Director, Danbury Computer Society, CT
www.dacs.org
jscheef (at) yahoo.com

This article has been obtained from APCUG with the author’s permission for publication by APCUG member groups; all other uses require the permission of the author (see e-mail address above).

It’s Over – And So It Begins
As we all get used to the prospect of President Obama, some with trepidation, others with jubilation, the one thing we can be sure of is that change is coming. Trite as that sounds now, his presidency will be historic in more ways than we can possibly know right now. But how will it affect us, the computer-using public, is more important – well to us anyway. For instance, the White House will have its first CTO (chief technology officer) recognizing the role of technology and information systems in everything we do. Hopefully, the White House will no longer need to worry about losing emails as it seemed to be such a problem for the outgoing administration. 

A Future in Chrome
Will Chrome steal the plating off Microsoft’s shine? This topic could be more complex than why the Republicans lost the elections. Fortunately, there are far fewer pundits talking about it so I will point you to two eWeek articles that get into some depth. Google Chrome Could Nuke Microsoft From the Internet Market (tinyurl.com/6pkkue) (for web: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Google-Chrome-Could-Nuke-Microsoft-From-the-Internet-Market/) and Google Chrome Keeps Pace with Web App Advances (tinyurl.com/64xjz4). [for web: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/A-Technical-Overview-of-Google-Chrome/] The second is more technical and shows Flash crashing in a Yahoo webpage rendered in Chrome. With the 800-pound gorilla of Google pushing Chrome, it will become a player in how we interact with the web. Whether it will become Google’s “web operating system”, only time can tell. 

Two Lists of Ten
Before we leave Chrome, here are 10 things to love (and hate) about Google Chrome from TechRepublic (http://tinyurl.com/4z97lu). (for web: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=422) Read thru this article and perhaps you’ll see why I think Chrome will be important – or at least a good browser. 

The second list is 10 ways you might be breaking the law with your computer (http://tinyurl.com/5f8r89) from the same blog. (http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=356) This one shows how insidious the intellectual property laws have become with the inference that these laws need to become more rational and reflect the needs of consumers as well as owners.

Does Search Really Work?
Why is it that when I search for ‘man bites mosquito’, I get 400,000 hits for exactly the opposite? But, if I search for ‘man bites grasshopper’, the third and fifth items are articles about a man biting a dog? If first generation search was either simple word indexes built by web crawlers like Alta Vista or indexes built by hand like the initial Yahoo. Google brought in the second generation where search ranking is based on other criteria – like other links to the site or consistency of information within a site, etc. 

Some people, like those who design new search engines or who write articles about it (tinyurl.com/5qkyql), (for web: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/The-Only-Problem-With-Google-Yahoo-Microsoft-Search-is-That-Theyre-Awful/) think the coming generation of search will be based on semantics and the “social graph”. Semantics, of course, involved the meanings of words and thus their order becomes significant. Current search treats your search arguments as keywords and the order you give them has little significance, hence the results to man bites dog are really for dog bites man (unless you search for the string in quotes which is still a different search). I started to use this as my example but there is a movie out called “Man Bites Dog” so that search found many references to the movie but none to what I really meant. So semantics sounds great, right?

Social graph refers to the Google Social Graph API (code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/). This application programming interface allows developers of web sites that rely on users to build content, to use links that people have already made public to create links between social sites like Facebook and Classmates, to pick a couple that you have probably heard of. At least that is what the article implies. 

I had to do some searching to find this as the article doesn’t really explain it. Searching for the string “social graphic” returned forty results out of 135,000. Using my eyeballs on these results I found a reference to a gawker.com article (gawker.com/tag/social-graphic/) about “Six Degrees Of Separation Between George W. Bush and Parker Posey.” We know who the first guy is and Parker Posey is some kind of musician or something (I don’t really care but apparently everyone agrees that the relationship strains credibility). According to the diagram in the article, these two people are linked by two chains of six or less “degrees”. A diagram of social relationships is what does this and social web sites like LinkedIn and Facebook could be a source for such information – maybe. In the immortal words of the excellent motivational speaker Dr. Richard Byrne, “It will if it does, and it won’t if it doesn’t.” (Don’t bother searching for Dr. Byrne as he passed away before the advent of the search engine.)

So why isn’t search better? There is actually an incentive for current search engines to not get any better. If it takes you four or five tries to find what you want, Google or Yahoo get three or four additional opportunities to show you advertising. Remember, that’s what pays for all this.